Miina Supinen

Säde

WSOY 2013, 328 pages 

Säde is a pretty petite blonde Finn, slightly chaotic and egoistic, who worries about the future sometimes, but mostly seems to live in the present, sleeping with whom she pleases and working odd jobs here and there. Vic is an English archaeologist she met on a digging site in Greece, some fifteen years older than she is, and who is mainly concerned with drinking and women. Now Vic has a job for her at a site in Finland which has been commissioned by Voula, a flaming Greek-Finnish leader of a kind of commune that worships old gods.

Säde has been raised in an atheist family and is suspicious of anything remotely religious and her boyfriend Antti who she lives with has Asperger’s and is not especially bothered by the fact that Säde works and sleeps with Vic. Despite the potential for serious drama here, it is a fairly subdued story, told matter-of-factly with slightly eccentric characters and just a whiff of something which goes deeper and which one maybe cannot explain in full.

The only real distraction from the story was the huge number of typos in the book, but this has nothing to do with the author’s writing style.